I’ve been wanting a program that does this for a long time, it’s so simple yet so elegant. CD Art Display is a free program for Windows that works with almost all popular windows media players (iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, foobar2000 but not Songbird) and then some. It takes the album art you already have tagged to your music and shows it on your desktop along with the name of the song, rating, artist, album and time left. Best of all it enables global hot-keys so that programs like iTunes, which lack them, can now be controlled easily from the keyboard.

I know you think Linux is only for nerds, but it’s not, in fact it’s super awesome. Many people are only afraid of Linux because they’ve never tried it, that’s where Wubi comes in. If you think you’re brave enough to install Linux without affecting your Windows install, read on after the jump. (more…)

For the security conscious TrueCrypt is a must. It has several different encryption options, I’m not going to pretend to understand the difference between them but from what I understand they are all pretty ridiculous. Better yet it allows you to use multiple encryption layers at once, making your files super-secure. Best of all it works with Windows, Mac, and Linux, so if you have things on your computer you want to keep ridiculously private, TrueCrypt is the way to go.

P.S. TrueCrypt is also a good way to hide pornography from loved ones.

Only in the the last few years have I used a Mac as my primary computer. I still consider myself very tech agnostic though, and still use Windows with regularity and Linux every now and then. One of the programs I found myself missing the most when I moved to Mac OS X (besides Minesweeper) was MS Paint. OS X lacks a stupid-simple image editor/basic drawing tool. That’s why I was so glad when I found Paintbrush.

If you’re big on social networks then you need Flock, its a lot like Firefox (because its built from Firefox) but it has tools for most popular social networks built in. Just to name a few, it works with Facebook, Digg, Youtube, Flickr, and Twitter. If you have a blog you can post to it straight from Flock’s built in blog editor, a pretty nice feature. Best of all, just like Firefox, it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you’re gonna get it, I would go with the beta version because it’s built on Firefox 3, which I like more than 2, and as far as my tests go the beta is pretty stable.

Every now and then I realize my hard drive is 90% full. When that happens I turn to WinDirStat to find out why. It’s a free program that creates a chart that graphically represents what files are on your computer, color coding by file type. This easily lets you see what’s taking up all that precious space. Sorry non-windows users but WinDerStat is windows only, but if your on linux try KDirStat and Mac users give Disk Inventory X a try, I haven’t used either of those so leave a comment if they’re any good.

Along the same lines as VLC, Perian allows all sorts of video formats to play in Quicktime itself, which is a little more convenient than having to launch VLC. Perian installs as a System Preferences pane, and so has a very small footprint. This is one of the first things I install on any new Mac.

I can’t remember the last time I had a video file that actually played correctly in Windows Media Player. That’s the reason I turned to VLC player, which will play pretty much anything you can throw at it right out of the box. If you want to find out more, read on after the jump.

If you’re anything like me then you have way to many programs in your start menu. My beef with the start menu is how long it takes to find a program, having to click 3 or 4 times. Now with Launchy you wont have to click at all. If you want to learn more read on after the jump.

So if you know anyone even remotely tech savvy I guarantee they have tried to push Firefox on you. Why? There’s actually a ton of reasons to switch over from Internet Explorer or even Safari for you Mac users out there. Read on after the jump.